Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 30, 2010 @07:47AM
from the really-right-rails dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After two years of gestation, 4 betas, 2 release candidates and thousands of commits by 1600+ contributors, the result of the succesful merge of the Merb and Rails frameworks (and teams) is now out and ready to transport your web applications on all new shiny tracks."

I find it a bit hard to keep up with rapid changes to Rails. But that's my problem anyway. I think the changes and additions in Rails 3 are wonderful and the team did a good job on this. Congratulations and thank you!

I've avoided Rails for years due to the community's reputation. So against my better judgement, I decided to build a project on the Rails 3 Beta, thinking that some of frameworks new features made it hard to ignore.

And you know what? It's a really nice framework. Nice enough that in the future, I'll probably be using Ruby on Rails instead of PHP or Python when the project allows.

Not sure if you're aware of this but Rails isn't the only widely used Ruby web framework. There's also Sinatra, which is quite popular, and then there is Camping and a handful of other lesser know options. The really nice thing about all of them though is that they are all built on Rack which means they can all play nice together. That is the real beauty of the Ruby community, even our different projects can play nice together because we have common points of integration.

The major problem with Rails is that it's tied to Ruby. Historically, Ruby's interpreters have not exactly been speed demons.

That hasn't been the only big problem with Rails. Rails. Indeed, one of the problems with (pre-3.0) Rails is that was particularly inefficient in many key areas of how it used Ruby; one of the big motivations for the myriad other Ruby web frameworks that came out after Rails was using Ruby more efficiently than Rails (Rails 3.0 incorporates many of those lessons into Rails, so that should be less of a problem going forward.)

Rail, pre-3.0, actually had on its own the same kind of problems as pre-1.9.x Ruby had.